Early Ideas for Thriller Opening

In the early stages of of our planning, we had vague ideas about themes and concepts that we wanted to include. From looking at the words above, you can see that we definitely wanted to include a theme of death as it is a very common convention of thriller films. If there is likely to be a death occurring, it makes the film more suspenseful because a character's life will be danger.

There are also some ideas for the location above. We considered using an abandoned house with quite dark lighting inside causing plenty of shadows. With dark lighting it gives reasons for characters to not see things coming. This is the same for the audience; if there is not enough light for them to see clearly, they will not know when an antagonist is approaching. If the film is set in an abandoned building, it will be a sinister environment because you will not know what has happened there before, why it was abandoned and who could have been there since then.

Character  is a very important aspect for any thriller film. We considered who are protagonist would be. Above are some of the words to describe the character; Innocent, alone, trapped, helpless. We plan for this character to be a teenage girl who has stumbled upon something unusual. The antagonist will not be identified in our opening, as this is something that will eventually become clear later on. However, we do know what kind of person it will be; a murderer, mysterious, obsessive etc. We also thought about having religious themes in the opening, like bible clipping with highlighted parts about death. Perhaps the murderer was obsessed with the bible, and interpreted parts of it to an extreme.